Circumspections:
A blog by Richard J. DeLotto, knowledge wrangler, meme rancher, ignorance manager, Cassandrist and Former Gartner Analyst.
First, some apologies—I seem to have again posted half or so of an early draft, rather than the finished copy. Whatever GoDaddy uses for websites just seems fundamentally incompatible with MSFT Word.
I heartily recommend George Friedman’s The Next Decade: Empire and Republic in a Changing World, and think you will find it both useful and enjoyable.
Over the years I have become a fan of this author and his company. Stratfor.com has provided a wealth of basic insights, and more than once made me glad that I had read his archives BEFORE opening my mouth in public. Whenever I read his “stuff” I feel I have been allowed to sit at The Grown-up’s Table. The Next Decade is no exception.
Sadly, I let this book sit around for awhile because I thought it was just going to be a re-write of his recent The Next 100 Years and materials too ethereal to make it on his website. Instead, I found an interesting amalgam of geopolitical situation report and musings on America’s forthcoming, semi-unwilling transition from Republic to Empire transition. As always, it is well-written and full of insight. Even though I subscribe to his service, STRATFOR.com, and read almost all of its daily output I found new material in this book.
There are a lot of “End of America as We Know It” books floating around right now. But this is not one of them. Friedman presents a ruthlessly unsentimental, refreshingly extreme realpolitik worldview. Using Rome and Britain as models, he describes Us as a nation that wants the privileges of power, but not the responsibilities, in a world where ”justice comes from power, and power is only possible from a degree of ruthlessness most of us can’t abide”
He proposes that America’s fundamental interests are limited to preserving the physical security of the United States and the maintenance of a “relatively free” world economic system. Rather than promotion of any “detailed objective” such as voter’s rights, or the environment, the USA’s strategic goal must be to prevent the emergence of any power that can challenge—successfully or not-- the United States in any given corner of the world, and our best chance of success in this lies in the fostering the development of regional balances of power in which neither individual nations nor likely alliances can realistically challenge US power.
His views on the unique role of the President of the United States (POTUS) alone are worth the price of the book and time spent digesting it. He describes the main “real-life” jobs of the presidency as:
Essentially, POTUS must conduct a “ruthlessly unsentimental” foreign policy for a nation with the irrational desire to be loved, or “at least left alone.” As Commander–in-Chief of the most powerful military in history, stronger than both any individual country or likely coalition of countries, POTUS is the only human capable of reaching out and wreaking devastation on a planetary scale.
Most of the book is a series of situation reports, analyses and assessments of partners, allies, coalitions and planetary conditions. Some examples:
A worldwide trend toward economic nationalism is exacerbated by a turndown in the economic cycle and ability of Diasporans to remain in intimate touch electronically.
Weapons of Mass Destruction or Casualties (WMD/C) are easy to picture, hard to make, may be nearly impossible to use effectively as a tool of statecraft. He claims that the USA is the only state ever to build an atomic bomb from “scratch.” No one has used one successfully since.
Russia: Long-term shrinkage of the widely-spread Russian population is making it hard to distribute food and electricity, much less project power. In the long run they will be unable to maintain a position of international influence.
China’s ”60 million “middle class” ($20/k/y) is less than 5% of the population. Most live in Beijing or within 100 miles of coast. 80% of population lives in “conditions that compare with the poverty of Sub-Saharan Africa.” Government MUST increase both jobs and internal security. China is a land power COMPLETELY dependant on open sea lanes for food, fuel, exports. Fetal sex selection and “single child” policies has boxed their options badly. Revolts and breakup are more than possible.
India seems more likely to be a major player than China, with who they share an essentially unresolved border and no great love. GF never quite comes out and says it, but plainly expects a major naval war between India and China in SE Asian waters in the next decade over control of the sea lanes and resources.
EU/NATO and the USA share a goal of not letting any other great power rise, with the added complication that the EU can no longer “contain” /restrain Germania. EU will remain some sort of an economic union, without unifying economically or politically. Long-term improvements in German-Russ relationships threat to both EU.US interests. He seems to expect the UK to leave the EU, especially when the Falklands War breaks out again.
Anglosphere: There is a fundamental coherence of US/UK strategies and interests, and compatibility of political structures and traditions. Export-driven Canada, Australia, NZ are completely dependant on historic UK and US “open seas” policy.
Though to paraphrase Kipling, “here is nothing new nor aught unproven”, The Next Decade is a useful summation of what we are likely to face leading up to and after the Next Election.
For reasons that will no doubt become clear over time, we are in the process of accumulating real estate. Nice building lots, with great views, services in place, surrounded by thriving, desirable communities. The Mysterious Red-haired Woman and her friends are handling things with their usual style, grace and blood-chilling rapacity, leaving me nothing to do but observe and muse.
One thing that is beginning to bother the heck out of me, long term, is the way foreclosed properties are being disposed of at auction as bundles by the banks. While I understand it is easier and cheaper for them to sell many lots at once rather than one at a time, this may be resulting in the concentration of land assets into the hands of a very small number of new owners, in many cases for rental or renovation and resale.
Some Bad Thoughts:
The more I see of it the more I am absolutely certain that Evil Deeds Are Being Done. I just wonder, for example, how many criminals are laundering themselves into Respected Local Properly Owner through cash deals for distressed land? Does anyone have to do Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), Interdiction List or anti-money laundering checks on CASH deals?
Expect profound changes to local communities, as political control shifts from a home-owning voting class to one dominated by renters and absentee landlords.
Local taxes are most assuredly going to rise, and services shrink, as property values drop. This will be constraining when inflation invariably occurs rapidly “improving” prices.
Landlords just do not maintain property as nicely as owner occupants. If nothing else, this will cut the “hedonic value” of communities, and shabbily-maintained houses almost invariably reduce the potential selling price of nearby homes.
Can’t help but notice, though, that the “exciting” chunks of dirt never seem to make it back to the public market. Some things just don’t change.
I attempted to sell real estate about a zillion years ago, and just cannot believe, by the way, how much easier it is to do this with the new tablets, netbooks and smartphones. Imagine pulling off the side of a road with a great view.. and using Google maps, Zillow and real estate sites to see if anything in the area is available, accessing assessor’s records and neighborhood gossip. One place I looked seemed really sweet until I read on Some Social Site that the neighborhood was nicknamed “Meth Valley.”
I was casually multitasking a few nights ago and had this wonderful old song by Bonnie Tyler come to mind while I tried to ignore the primary returns and write a review of Friedman's The Next Decade.
“Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?
Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn and I dream of what I need.
Chorus: I need a hero. I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night.
He's gotta be strong and he's gotta be fast and he's gotta be fresh from the fight.
I need a hero. I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light.
He's gotta be sure and it's gotta be soon and he's gotta be larger than life!
Larger than life!
Somewhere after midnight
In my wildest fantasy
Somewhere just beyond my reach
There's someone reaching back for me.
Racing on the thunder and rising with the heat
It's gonna take a superman to sweep me off my feet.
Chorus
Up where the mountains meet the heavens above
Out where the lightning splits the sea
I could swear there is someone somewhere watching me.
Through the wind and the chill
And the rain and the storm and the flood
I can feel his approach like a fire in my blood!
Chorus”
We all KNOW it just ain’t gonna happen, that the "die has been thrown, river crossed and bridge ignited behind us"… but the stream of discontent is wide and deep, and might not be quiet for very much longer. Republicrats must remember that there are factions out there other than the Churchmice, and they just don’t see much difference between a theocracy and progressivism.
Every once and awhile I come up with a book with New Art: something I can repurpose to my own nefarious ends. Alien Invasion: How to Defend Earth is one such work. It provides many insights and techniques useful for planners and strategists, regardless of specialty, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who might need to address analyze seemingly unprecedented, career-killing, situations, or plan in low-information environments.
First, it is for real. This is a serious work by written by authors Travis Taylor and Bob Boan, multiply-degreed professionals from the defense and space industries. Incidentally, Taylor is, also, both a rising SF author and star of the television science program “Rocket City Rednecks”. They are pushing this work out as an ice-breaker for serious discussion, and make it clear right from the start that it is incomplete and far from as polished as they would like. There are lots of things that people more senior to you in the information food chain just do not want to hear, and this work can give you some ideas on how to not only get them on the table, but epoxy them there until they are addressed. Keep in mind that we are currently in an environment where control of the “High Frontier” is vital to EXISTING national security, but funding for near-earth exploration is looked on as a unnecessary frill to be cut as soon as encountered.
Second, The text is soundly grounded in history. Never forget that your funding is only as good as the story you tell to get it, and a wealth of historical case studies can be beyond price at pitch-time. For technique-thieves, they demonstrate how examples from popular literature and entertainment can be used to provide gut-level problem size scaling accessible to wide audiences. The authors draw examples from the vast treasury of sci-fi entertainment and world history to demonstrate that vastly asymmetric force correlations have happened both “on TV” and multiple times in our recent past. Cavalry, steel armor and firearms were advanced terror-weapons to the stone-age sophisticates encountering them for the first time. Sea-going vessels were as strange to many shore-hugging natives as starships will seem to us. The plow, telegraph and railroads were, world-wide, simply unstoppable.
Third, it is simply the best book I have seen on how to professionally handle contentious, high-impact, low probability scenarios beset with iron-bound conventional wisdoms. Starting with the examination of existing belief sets (they elegantly demolish the conventional wisdom of the Drake Equations) they examine current civilian disaster/continuity programs and show the problems of disaster preparedness are universal and generally have scalable responses. No matter how unworldly the causes, the impacts fall into predictable categories with known, knowable, and/or optimal responses. Problems such as having response plans be well known without revealing confidential plans and perceptions are well addressed. For all that, there are some odd holes, where things that pretty obviously should be discussed aren’t even brought to the table, leaving one to ponder at length about Non Disclosure Agreements.
Finally, it is well written, far better than the television special drawn from it would lead you to suspect, and far above the rather dismal drivel one often encounters about planning. Math skills are sometimes useful, but you can fast-forward your brain over the equations. Keep in mind, though, that the book has the aura of a late-night back-of-the-envelope calculation, and may be all the proof one needs that alcohol and whiteboards should NEVER be mixed. For many of us, it will feel like home, but with better coffee.
Some semi-random thoughts after reading several months worth of overdue e-mail:
Ever wonder what the hell they mean by “One Percent?” The Economist and US Census note that most in that income bracket are STILL wage-slaves, and not living off investment incomes as previous fiscal elites have done. “16% of the top 1% were in medical professions and 8% were lawyers: financial occupations 13.9% in 2005.” Only 6% or so self-report as non-working.
I found an NYT piece titled “Where the 1 Percent Fit in the Hierarchy of Income” back on, October 28, 2011. They break it out as follows:
Top Hundredth of One Percent: 0.01%: These 14,000 families share 5% total U.S. income with incomes starting at $11 million; averaging $31 million; These 14,000 families share 5% total U.S. income.
Top Tenth of One Percent: The 135,000 families qualifying to be in the top tenth of a percent need an annual income of $2 million to make the cut, and have average family income $3.9 million, 6% of the US total.
Top One Percent: The cutoff for the top percent is a surprisingly low $386,000 income, though average income is higher at $717,000. 1.35 million familes hold 11% of total US income.;
Top 10 Percent starting at: $108,000 Average income: $167,000 Number of families: 13.2 million Share of total U.S. income: 25%
Bottom 90% income: $36,000; Number of families: 132 million Share of total U.S. income: 53%
If your only solutions to a problem have a high risk of making things worse, postponing action (“kicking the can down the road”) is an excellent idea. No one seems to have any clue as to the length of the road, resilience of the can, or strength of the kicking foot. I am not even sure we are kicking the right can in an appropriate direction.
I think we may be finally seeing the bursting of the Chicken Little Balloon. How many times will we allow the Chattering Classes to predict Armageddon without producing an actual demon? I mean, besides Newt? (Note: Make sure to check any demon for his green card…) WARNING: I resolve to aggressively demand definitions and timelines from anyone predicting disasters of any kind. What do you mean by “collapse?” Where in Canada do you plan to move? Will you wait for the US Troops to shoot first? Do all Republicans really want your grandmother to die?
How soon will we see a video game based on the collapse of the euro or the dollar? Or a serious shooter based in a near-future civil war? Or “reality” TV programming with ex-refugees passing along helpful hints on urban asymmetric warfare?
I wish to thank the Democrats for making arms ownership popular again. Clinton and O’Bama have done more to arm Americans than any Presidents since Lincoln sent the troops home with their rifles and side arms. A recent survey reported 90 known firearms for every one hundred adult citizens, roughly 1 in 7 people all told. Now go out and get a few hundred rounds each, and cleaning kits.
I hope to get back on serious subjects shortly, but have been spending most of my time at my bench making almost every mistake possible without using power tools.
Sorry for the lack of written output here last month. I figured you just did not need another heaping serving of bad attitude.
First, let me say upfront that I am a news junkie. I fully subscribe to what we used to call Niven’s Law, which went something like “The only thing that will harm you faster than something you don’t understand is something you don’t know.” The news comes on when I wake at 0400, and lulls me to sleep at night… I have usually worked alone, and just like hearing people talk in the background, I guess, and besides, I spent most of the last 20 years making a fair living at being able to extract critical action triggers (“Nooz yous can use”) from the background noise faster than my coworkers.
I had some conversations this holiday season that shocked and scared me. I found that a bunch of my closer friends have essentially given up on hearing any news at all, except for sports. Many had dropped their cable TV packages and got their entertainment from Hulu, YouTube, and other sources. Spin, the noise of politics and sensationalist reporting is driving people back into their comfort zones—all were deeply concerned about politics, but no one wanted to hear about it anymore. For those with kids, “I Dream of Jeannie” reruns seem a whole lot more family friendly than CNN or MSNBC. Several specifically mentioned that the news was giving their younger children nightmares. At least two couples said they had cancelled their cable TV packages entirely, and were accessing information solely over the web. I had never even heard of the entertainment programs they reported watching.
Demographically, the group was mostly 40 to 60 year old Caucasians and “latinos,” fairly evenly split by sex, overeducated, financially conservative but socially liberal. Most thought they would eventually die on the job, some because of finances, some because “they had no life” other than work. Politics were all over the place, but none had ever failed to vote. The social links were through being neighbors, having a shared history of leadership in the scouting movements or local sports, and being old friend’s new spouses.
I was fairly certain that this was happening with “youngsters” but was completely unaware that it had spread into what I would call “The Voting Class.” Part of me wants to say that they are just being rational, and it is far to early to be concerned yet, as NEITHER party has, in fact, picked their candidates, and almost anything could happen by November. Another part of me, though, is almost gibbering in stark, primal terror. No wonder politics seems so weird right now—no one is paying attention to anything anyone outside of their “in-group” says.
When I was a mere slip of a Westchester lad, and TV still new, we had three networks, maybe a public channel, and if the wind was right (literally) some local stations in other cities… I think 8 stations all told. There were two major newspapers available, plus other with varying degrees of finer focus. We bought the New York Times, Daily News, Reporter Dispatch, Patent Trader and North Castle News. Most had a “recognized” spin, but offered some degree of balance. Pretty much everyone was getting the same news, at mostly the same time.
This is no longer the case: broadcasting passed seamlessly through narrowcasting to microcasting. You can get more news than you might want to consume without EVER encountering an opinion at variance with those you already hold, or having your ideas challenged, or even encountering the faintest hint that your facts might be, shall we say, suspect? Each clique will grow to be more like itself, until there is, finally, no room to maneuver, or compromise or coexist.
PLEASE: Read someone you don't like-- watch some news you can't stand, and make damned sure your personal, corporate and political messages are going out on EVERY single channel your audience might be using.
Today, of all days, is a good one to cease our endless self-referential reveries (“extract our heads from our butts) and “check six” to see if we are going to be surprised about something. Sadly, this seems to be the case… please note that these are factoids, not a coherent argument.
The main role of the US news industry now is to serve as a platform for advertisers, not to inform the public. Do NOT expect any useful advance warning, or guidance. “Reality” can shift quite rapidly: a year ago people were being exhorted to have 3 months supplies of food and medicines handy in case of natural disaster-- and I have recently read that for some regime factions this is NOW considered to be a sign that you are a dangerous radical prepping for civil war.
I had a lot of build-up and scene setting for this, but tossed it all out… the questions are odd enough they need to be shown in their simplest possible form.
What if what we are seeing right now is not a collapse in the economy, or a failure of any “ism” as a way of running things, but represent instead an inability of the accounting systems to accurately report events in a 24x7 “real-time” environment?
Western accounting systems are essentially unchanged since the late thirteenth century. We might not like to admit it, but current public accounting memes are the survivor of hundreds of years of selective pressure to enable hiding scarce resources from revenue collectors, thieves and competitors while misleading superiors about one’s own performance. Accounting has been automated, but not improved. The systems could be 100% compliant with tax and reporting requirements… but still be functionally useless for managing a business or country. We could be planning with policies derived from improperly measuring the wrong things.
I keep coming up with a bad analogy, which I know in advance is inaccurate and misleading… these systems evolved to reflect Copernican world-view, predating even Isaac Newton: an environment when resources were scarce and computation difficult. This leads to the next question...
What if transaction speeds are high enough and granular enough in detail now that “packets of information” (money) are getting “relativistic” or “quantum” impacts as they move through the system? High frequency trading often profits on margins so low that the best analogy is to friction. Prices are historically set by the last sale, regardless of volume… how can this be known if a “zillion” sales can be transacted in a nanosecond, decsions need to be made in less time than it takes an electron to make it across a computer, and false impressions can be be encouraged by ephemeral micro-orders, which deliberately expire too fast to be accepted?
What if the current problem is not scarcity but abundance? Capital was scarce for most of history… maybe it isn’t so scarce anymore, particularly since large-scale wars have become unpopular. Physical plant can hang around being at least to some degree productive well beyond the point where it used to wear out in the course of business or be destroyed by invaders and require replacement. What is the useful life of capital equipment producing stuff that becomes unfashionable before it wears out? What happens to an economy if everyone can produce anything that anybody needs, for essentially the same cost in raw materials, and the product just doesn’t ever wear out?
What if there is no true source of information? Unless it happened right in front of you (and you probably missed it since you were checking your email) the images you see in the news are passing through a web of computers capable of manipulating any data to show whatever its masters wish, and backfilling the internet with as much mis-, dis-, and mal-information as is necessary to bolster their case.
What I love most about my More Excitable Friends is their steadfast belief that Their Boogiemann, whether it be the Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy, resurgent Communists, the Illuminati, Odessa or whatnot are capable of bringing overwhelming technological force against us.
Wrong again! The score is still Outside Contractors 2, Federal Government 0. Did you get to see the FEMA Emergency Network Test, or the Government Takeover of the Media, today? I was right there with cable TV, radio, PC and cell phone ready to watch free communications black out forever… and then it was 2:05, and I got bored. It is 4:00 and I am still waiting. Maybe they couldn’t get it to mesh with the FBI’s TOTAL Database… oh, right. THAT didn’t work and was cancelled. Maybe it interfered with the tracking devices in the cell-phones, PDAs and credit cards… or the Insidious Mind Control Street Lights. Our civil liberties remain intact, with the only damage being inflicted on our collective wallets.
Big Brother? More like doddering old Uncle Barry… a kind man, with good intentions, who just doesn’t understand that some things that look good on the whiteboard just don’t work in Real Life.
For the record: we also were not hit by the asteroid, NIburi, or Eleni, and the Grays did not turn Jupiter into a second Sun (I wonder if they used the same contractor… never mind.) Vast parts of the US remain formally Unoccupied. Newer Madrid didn’t happen, Oklahoma is still there. Europe still has a currency, but seems to be liking gold and US real estate too. Go figure. Best house in a bad neighborhood?
This document has been sourced entirely from publically-available documents.
Sorry for the hiatus. I have had several requests recently from friends and former colleagues to “look into” Occupy Wall Street to help them determine if it required a formal risk assessment. This took longer than I anticipated.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) describes itself as a ”leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions,” but is deeply rooted in the academic, political and labor establishments, with leadership and support from drawn SEIU, Former ACORNists and the Working Families Parties. There seems to be a small street-level group of paid activists, perhaps part of a national or international cadre of similarly-trained and motivated individuals, surrounded and screened by a diverse collection of special interest groups with widely varying interests and agendas.
OWS organizers call for increased government spending on social issues, including universal government-run health care, free universal higher education, stringent rent control on residential housing, mandatory paid sick leave for all workers, “greening” the economy by creating heavily subsidized union jobs in the energy sector, higher taxes on “the wealthy” and campaign finance restrictions.
OWS has enjoyed deep and uncritical media coverage, and is active to some degree in almost every major US media market, most notably NYC, LA, Washington and Boston. Many, however, quietly feel that OWS credibility is being undermined by many of the interviews of its more enthusiastic members that are available on social media sites such as YouTube.
Opinion:
OWS is an example of what during the Cold War was called “maskirovka”, or “masquerade”, a straightforward partisan use of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation to intensify the “fog of war” surrounding the upcoming US elections.
Expect the main role of OWS to be as an expendable screen protecting, masking and excusing a move toward the center by the Democrat Party as a whole. They serve as a magnet and free podium for the more extreme left and statist interest groups, many of which who will need to be abandoned by the self-styled Democrat Party if they hope to retain the most likely centrist voters.
Expect both implicit and explicit threats of personal violence against “the wealthy”— this was a problem during the “AIG bailout,” and OWS’ operational fingerprint mirrors the ACORN-lead activist groups involved with the AIG and “bail-out” protests of 2009.
Expect the real impact of the OWS agendas to be felt as indirect pressure from your existing corporate stakeholders, couched in terms of “corporate social responsibility”. Legislation and regulation take years to modify corporate behavior—social pressure is immediate.
